Graduate school enrollment is going down. Is this something American universities should try to correct, to get more people into these programs? Or is this the market at work, are college graduates merely making more rational decisions?
According to an article by Jon Fortenbury at USA Today:
A report by the Council of Graduate Schools…shows a 1.7 percent decline in enrollment of first-time graduate students between fall 2010 and fall 2011…. All fields experienced a decline in enrollment, except health sciences, which increased by 6.4 percent.
It’s the second year in a row that grad school enrollment has declined in America.
But graduate school applications are still increasing. The report indicated a 4.3 percent increase in graduate school applications.
So what’s going on? Well, according to the article the major factor here is funding. People are still applying, and being admitted, to graduate programs. It’s just that graduate schools are offering less funding. Students accepted but not offered funding simply decided not to enroll.
Unlike undergraduate programs, academic graduate programs (where students expect to earn PhDs or master’s degrees in humanities or the sciences) are usually free, or at least students expect them to be free.
But when students don’t receive funding, they take it (appropriately) as a good sign the programs to which they’ve been admitted don’t really want them very much.
This is in contrast to pre-professional programs (law degrees and MBAs), where large debt loads are common because students expect to earn vastly higher salaries once they graduate.
